Chapter Text
‘In all the lives we have been in,
You love me, and you die for me, then I regret you. If destiny is a thing I want to tear it apart with my own two hands just to love you.
But, it doesn’t work out like I’d want.
You die right in front of me, when I’m unaware, even if you don’t know me, because you know me, even if I try to block you from harm. And I’m sick of it.
All I want is to get a chance to love you, as much as you love me, but I can only remember you in the very last moment.
As I look at your dimming eyes I remember.
Oh, right,
I should have loved this bastard.
But you know what? I’ll love you one of these lives, my dear,
if it’s the last thing I do.’
-
He’s nine when he starts to remember.
He’s at a museum for a field trip, and Till is bored out of his mind. So when a classmate tugs him out of the group to look at the cooler weapons, he just follows along. To the corner he drags Till to there are crossbows, swords and daggers, the like. They are certainly more interesting than the clay pot the guide was telling them about.
He and his classmate look around a bit more before his classmate yelps out that they’d lost the group. They panic and start to run toward the direction the group had been going. But before he could take two steps his eye catches on a spear.
He trips and falls forward.
When Till looks up, he’s no longer in the museum. Yells ring around him and he hears the clang of swords clashing together. Somebody pushes him out of the way. The man has dark hair and that’s all Till sees before the man gets impaled by a long spear. Blood fills his vision.
‘Ivan?’
He’s crying. Till doesn’t know why but he’s crying. The fall didn’t hurt that much but he’s crying so much that his classmate is fretting over him. He’s scared, he’s so scared, he’s gasping sharp breaths because he can’t get rid of the pain in his heart. He wasn’t the one who got hurt but why does he feel like he’d gotten stabbed?
A teacher who was looking for them rushes over and asks if he’s okay. He nodds but he can't stop crying so he gets picked up by his mother early.
Till tries to forget about the vision but it doesn’t leave his mind. He flinches everytime his mother brings up the incident and he can’t quite look the classmate in the eye. He keeps thinking about it. About.. Ivan.
He remembers that name for some reason. He chants it in his head sometimes. Ivan, Ivan, Ivan. It feels sweet yet bitter on his tongue. It brings him joy, yet undeniable sorrow. Till wonders if he’ll ever see that man again.
Then a few months afterward, after an unremarkable day, he crawls under the covers and dreams.
He was walking home from an outing with his friends. He feels an odd feeling of uneasiness welling up inside of him. Till power walks through the unlit allies swiftly to get home. He turns around once when the feeling gets too strong, but there’s nobody there. He lets out a sigh and hurries into his house.
Later when he sees a news article of a murder and his eyes leak tears from the memories rushing in, he thinks he knows what the feeling was.
Till’s eyes snap open. A wave of terror starts to spread to the ends of his fingers. Again he starts crying, and he tugs his blanket tightly around him. He’s sweating and his heartbeat is ringing in his ears, he doesn’t quite know what the dream was about but he keeps trembling like a leaf.
When his mother knocks the door to wake him for school, she finds him staring listlessly at the wall. She calls the school to tell them he won’t be going and sits next to him. Till doesn’t react much except for leaning ever so slightly against her.
-
At the brink of death it’s always his face that Till sees.
The visions go on for years. Sometimes they come to him in his dreams or in the middle of the day. They sometimes come to him hours apart but then also months apart. Once he went a full year without a single one. Till becomes used to them overtime. But they are still heartbreaking nonetheless.
Dark hair, dark eyes but with red pupils, a smile with a snaggletooth. Ivan is always there.
He takes it all. A knife, a bullet, a sword, an arrow, a fall, a car, just about everything that could harm Till.
The worst part of it is that Till never remembers until the very end. He never gives Ivan a second look until Ivan makes him look. Till always feels a lot of emotions during a flashback or a dream, but most of all he feels regret.
Regret. For not loving Ivan as he should’ve, for making him feel the need to die for Till, and just for not looking at Ivan enough. All of Ivan he could remember vividly, was a self satisfied soft smile as he fell to his death. He knew nothing of what Ivan looked like when he was laughing, when he was crying, what he looked like when he was doing something he loved. He didn’t know anything about Ivan. Till wanted to know.
Till decides one night, after a vivid dream of Ivan dying even after Till thought he could save him, he was going to find Ivan. And Till was going to love him, he was going to love him enough to make up for all those past lives.
-
He didn’t have another vision for a full three years. Till wonders if that last vision was really the last one. He somehow doubts it was.
Till is 21 now, a university student and a music producer. He liked songs ever since he was younger, but for some reason he didn’t like singing very much.
It wasn't that he was bad at singing, if he says so himself, still, singing felt painful.
He was rushing to the studio because a recording session was back to back with a lecture when the last vision came. Immediately he doubled down, clutching at his heart.
The memories come in bursts.
Most of the time Ivan is someone he doesn’t know very well, they would meet in varying points of life but even if they were childhood friends never were they close. This time however, Till thinks they might have been at the very least friends .
They lock eyes through a glass window
They run and play together in a garden
They’re wearing white all the time, they have collars on their necks, Ivan knows how to take them off though.
Aliens, why are there aliens?
Red flowers.
They run across a field toward freedom. Ivan is laughing, Till looks at him with wonder. Red meteors shine a beautiful hue onto his face. Till is letting go though. Why is he letting go? He’s running back. Ivan smiles painfully. Till doesn't like that smile.
There is a pink haired girl. She looks like Mizi. He thinks he loves her. She’s smiling sweetly, she is an angel in the sea of competition. She’s shining bright, so bright that Till never looks at Ivan. Till wants to yell at himself to look at Ivan.
A dark haired girl dies, she looks like Sua. The Mizi look alike disappears. Despair, he is feeling despair. He doesn’t want to go on anymore. A soft hand caresses his cheek, he’s too out of it to see who.
Till v.s. Ivan
Till wonders what that means. He walks up to the stage, to the mic. He starts singing. Ivan is next to him and they sing together. He stops singing near the end of the song. Ivan throws down his mic and walks to him. The next thing he knows Ivan is pulling him into a kiss. His eyes are wide open and he tries to push Ivan away. Ivan holds him tighter.
Then there are hands on his neck that are Ivan’s. Ivan is choking him and Till, he lets him. He doesn't know why doesn’t remember why, but he lets him. Ivan tugs him closer for a last chaste kiss and then…
A gunshot rings out. Then another. Ivan coughs blood out. Till’s eyes widen in horror.
A smile. The same god damned smile every time.He falls to the ground and Till could only stare. He remembers , memories rush in , he remembers but he doesn’t want to.
He collapses to the ground next to Ivan and tries to clutch him to his chest. Helpless tears trickle down his cheeks and a high pitched whine is coming out of his throat.
He remembers, should have loved this damned bastard. This was the closest he’d ever gotten. Why couldn’t he have remembered earlier? Why was he the one always saved? It hurt, it all hurt so much. Was this fate? If it was, Till wanted to tear it apart.
“Next time, next time, I promise, I’ll, I’ll make sure you never get hurt because of me okay?” He sobbed. “Okay?”
Ivan’s dim eyes held no response but Till placed a hand on Ivan’s cheek and whispered the promise into his ear over and over again. The aliens pull Ivan away from him and Till tries his hardest but in the end they take Ivan away from him.
And Till thinks that this was what was missing. This was the last memory.
He’s on the floor of the studio and he doesn’t know how much time has passed but he can’t breathe and his heartbeat is too loud, his blood is pounding in his ears and he feels like he’s dying-
“-ill! Till!”
Pink fills his view and he flinches away. Mizi grabs his shaking hands and holds them against her.
“Breathe with me okay?!”
She takes exaggerated breaths and Till tries his best to match them. Images of the vision linger in his view. He could see vividly the blood on Ivan’s face and he could still hear the thud of his body hitting the floor. The sound of rain and Ivan’s gentle hands. He starts to sob.
He hugs his arms to himself and tries to contain it but he doesn’t succeed. Tears roll down his face like never before and he mourns Ivan.
Why couldn't that idiot have loved somebody else? Somebody who would love him just as much as he loved them. Why'd it have to be Till, when all Till did was look at another?
Thoughts race through his head and all it seems he can do right now, is cry.
Mizi is very alarmed, to say the least. She hovers over him for a minute before just hugging him until he calms down.
He cries a while, but eventually Till does calm down.
“...Thanks.” He manages to mutter, when his breathing is back in control.
He pulls away from her with a bit of embarrassment. She shakes her head in response. Mizi is looking at him with thinly veiled concern.
“What was that about?”
Till wipes his tears off with his shirt and looks away.
“I, nothing, I, I don't want to talk about it.”
It wasn't nothing Mizi knows it was nothing but she just shoots him a worried look and otherwise doesn’t push. He must have looked really pathetic. Mizi does insist on rescheduling the recording, though. She leaves the studio telling him to rest up.
So he packs up, and he goes home. The vision is still lingering but the world is mostly blurry. When he gets home he doesn't know how he got there.
He gets ready for bed, heeding Mizi's request for him to have some rest and he recalls the promise he made to Ivan. Till promises it again to himself.
He was never going to let Ivan get in harm. In this life, at least for this life, he’s not going to allow it.